In recent years, point-of-sale (POS) terminals and the software that supports POS business applications have become increasingly complex. New ‘modular’ applications have been developed to capitalize on the new POS terminal capabilities and serve to increase the utility value of the point-of-sale terminal. Concurrently, the internet has provided an opportunity to increase the communication bandwidth to the POS terminals, again increasing the type of functionality and transactions that can be supported. However, the POS terminals themselves lack the capacity to store large amounts of data and the business applications available to POS terminals are therefore limited.
The number of merchants, terminals and transactions is increasing annually. Along with these increases, there has been an increase in fraud at the point-of-sale. Current methods fail to adequately prevent consumer and merchant fraud from occurring at the point-of-sale. Authenticating transactions originating from POS devices using secure tokens, digital certificates and other unique merchant identifiers used to control or limit individual user access and functionality are not easily supported by conventional methods.
Also, the process of configuring the POS terminal to function in accordance with the merchant's needs and approved transactions is becoming increasingly complex and time consuming. One drawback to conventional methods for configuring POS devices is related to the current method of downloading the POS business application programs (eg. restaurant, retail, lodging, mail order, petroleum) and the merchant-specific configuration attributes (eg. Bar-tabs, tips, merchant-id, terminal-id, American Express SE number). Current methods rely on transferring (i.e. downloading) this information over dial or high-speed connections with a host-based system. The process is very time consuming, error prone and therefore expensive.
Another drawback to conventional methods for introducing new products to the market is related to the fact that the POS business applications must first be certified by the credit card processors (such as Vital Processing, Nova Information Systems, Global Payments, RBS Lynk, First Data) in advance of commercial use. Certification must be completed separately by each processor for each type of POS terminal and business application prior to the device being approved for sale and support (as a ‘Class-A’ product). This certification process is generally manual in nature, time consuming and expensive and often requires 6 to 12 months per each business application. Any single change such as a line of source code (or for example an additional module added) to a business application requires that, the certification process start over again. POS terminal manufacturers (i.e. Verifone, Hypercom, Ingenico, others) are therefore constrained in their ability to sell and distribute new POS terminal models until the business applications are certified (and therefore supported) by the major processors. This scenario creates friction in the distribution channel as the manufacturers seek to gain market share with new innovative equipment because it requires them to wait for each of the major processors (i.e. First Data, Vital Processing, Global Payments, Nova Information Systems, RBS Lynk, others) to first certify the business applications.
Finally, because of the high cost of the device and the security requirements, the POS terminal industry is generally constrained to sell terminals and software only for use by approved merchants and they do not typically sell terminals directly to consumers for use at the home or office.
The price of non-volatile (flash) memory is rapidly decreasing while the capacity and available is increasing. The next generation of POS devices will support non-volatile, detachable flash memory from serial, USB, and other methods. In fact, POS manufacturers are in the very beginning stages of supporting USB devices on POS terminals and there are no commercial uses of this technology today on POS devices. Computer programs (i.e. Business Applications) can and should be developed to enhance the utility value, functionality and security of these next generation POS devices. It will be difficult for the industry to embrace this new technology using current methods.
Therefore, a need exists for an apparatus and method that addresses these shortcomings in the prior art by utilizing the new capabilities provided through non-volatile, removable flash memory.